The present disclosure relates generally to scheduling and initiating collaboration events. In particular, one embodiment relates to a framework for scheduling resources and automatically invoking a collaboration event using preferences provided by the collaboration event participants.
The use of collaboration tools (teleconference, web-conference, instant chat, video conference etc) is essential to enable effective and efficient communications amongst employees, vendors, customers, suppliers, and any other participants that need to communicate in order to get the business of the organization done. Well organized meetings that use these collaboration techniques, that are started on time with all required and essential participants, should produce better results than meetings that are not organized effectively, and/or initiated on time, and/or don't have all the relevant/important participants available. For an organization in which collaboration meetings are started late, the cost in terms of loss of employee productivity and employee costs can amount to significant sums of money when accumulated over a period of time.
When scheduling an event, the person organizing the meeting can use email to determine participants' availability for the meeting. An email can be sent to all participants suggesting a time for the meeting (or polling participants for the most suitable time for that meeting) and participants are required to confirm if that timeslot would work for them. The participants would respond indicating whether they can attend or not and/or will offer alternative timeslots. This iterative cycle continues until a timeslot can be found where all participants can be scheduled for that meeting.
With the advent of calendaring applications, the scheduling of meetings has become easier and more efficient, as the availability of the required participants for a particular time during the week can be looked up in a shared calendaring application at the time the meeting is being created. There is no time lost in arranging the meeting as is the case described above in which email is used to coordinate participant availability and eventual meeting time. Moreover, calendaring applications, based on participants availability, can automatically find/search the first available time slot that all participants are available, making it easier to schedule a meeting.
Once a meeting slot has been identified at which all participants can participate, then the meeting can be created in the calendaring application and all participants can be informed of the meeting details. That is, the meeting appointment will appear in the participants calendar view for that day.
Although calendaring applications have made it easier to schedule collaboration events and notify participants of the events, many problems still exist when the time for the meeting actually arrives. For example, a meeting that is to be held via a telephone conference facility (i.e. participants dial-in using their telephone, mobile phone or IP Phone) may have a phone number and passcode for that meeting provided to the attendees of that meeting via the calendar invite. Likewise if the meeting is to be via a video conference then details of the video conference session ID and passcode are provided for participants in the calendar invite. Also if the meeting is a through the use of a web conference then a web conference id and passcode is provided in the calendar invite. However, such a scheme assumes that the collaboration event participants will have access to their calendaring application in order to retrieve the various call in numbers and conference passcodes. With the increasing mobility of today's workforce, collaboration participants may be attending meetings from any number of locations where they lack access to their calendaring applications. Furthermore, the manual process by which collaboration even participants join a collaboration event is prone to user error which not only increases the amount of time wasted in joining a collaboration event, but also increases the user's frustration level if multiple attempts at joining the event are required.
A further problem occurs when a subset of participants have joined the collaboration event. It is unclear at the start of the event who else will be joining the collaboration session and typically all participants will wait a few minutes, allowing “grace time” for all participants to join the event before a critical mass is present to make it worthwhile to commence the event. The need for participants to look up calendar invites, look up call details, and dial into meetings or invoke URLs to launch collaboration sessions, and then wait for some arbitrary time for all participants to join before starting the event all lead to inefficiencies, loss of productivity and directly to an opportunity cost (i.e. the economic cost of not being able to do something more effective with their time while waiting for participants to join the collaboration session). Though the loss of productivity may be a few minutes or more for the event as a whole, when multiplied by the number of participants in the event and then multiplied again by the many tens, hundreds or thousands of events that take place within an organization in a year, the costs can be quite significant.
Another problem present with calendaring solutions as they exist today is even when details of a collaboration session are entered for a meeting in the calendaring system, the collaboration resources required at the time of the meeting are not known. That is, current calendaring systems do not indicate what network resources, for example, are required for the organization at a given time during the day. If, for example, several hundred users of a conference call facility all dial into a collaboration event simultaneously and the system does not have sufficient bandwidth (lines) to make all those connections, then participants are waiting on busy signals and need to dial in again for their connection to be made. Likewise if many web-conferences are scheduled to take place at the same time a similar situation can occur. It would be useful for network and systems administrators to know in advance what the demands will be on the network so that they can ensure that the collaboration systems demands on the network can be met (or prioritized).
Embodiments of the present invention attempt to solve these and other problems individually and collectively.